Global celebration for the GNU System's 30th anniversary | Hacker News Reader

Global celebration for the GNU System's 30th anniversary

fsf.org

110 pointsTsiolkovsky14 comments

The work of the FSF and GNU is one of the most important in the history of computing. We benefit daily from the values of freedom, respect, and choice it presents. We also benefit from the abundance of knowledge and technologies that is openly available to all.

However, these rights and privileges must not be taken for granted and must continue to be protected. It is also in our interest to choose solutions and businesses that respect their users and their liberties.

Its pretty inspiring that writing code with a philosophy can change the world.

RMS and company, changed the way I not only look at software, but at my life and my freedoms.

Rings true for me as well. Back in the day before I read the GPL on my copy of Slackware, I was a Microsoft supporter!

Me too. Got me to realize that liberty is more important than how cool the "features" be.

It's interesting that the worlds most popular operating systems, Windows, iOS, and Android, use almost zero FSF software (the "system"), although much of Android is GPL licensed.

You do realize that Android uses the GNU/Linux kernel, right?

The kernel is just Linux. GNU/Linux refers to the combination of the Linux kernel and GNU userland (core libraries and binaries).

While I'm sure you're getting downvoted because people think that Linux the kernel has nothing to do with GNU, this isn't quite true: Linux uses the GNU General Public License and at the time of its initial announcement had to compare itself with GNU (and how it wasn't going to be as "professional" as GNU).

While Linus himself nowadays actively speaks out against GNU, he still use GNU's license and GNU's software (gcc and glibc), so even in Linux alone, without the GNU userland, we see some influence of GNU on Android.

Parent is getting downvoted because Linux is not from the FSF.

But so much of what we depend on every day, servers, supercomputers, infrastructure, compilers, etc..., relies on FSF software. Stuff like GCC, Make, Glib, Emacs, to implementations of various standard languages, and this of course doesn't count the FSF's influence, which is much broader than the packages they offer...

Whether or not Android and iOS use FSF software, they do use software that was inspired by what the FSF pioneered...

> It's interesting that the worlds most popular operating systems, Windows, iOS, and Android

It's interesting that all of these OSes are provided TOGETHER with the machines they are sold with and therefore completely remove the possibility for the user to "choose" something else. Of course on a PC you can always install a Linux distro, but it's not like most consumers know about it.

Nice pictures. It was a great time and those cupcakes were delicious.

Yay! Long live GNU!

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